Solid Block of Ise

I suffer from depression. Clinical depression. The bad stuff. The really, really bad stuff. For the last seven years I’ve fought a battle against something inside me that’s broken. Because that’s how I feel about being depressed - I feel as if something inside me is broken. Something isn’t right. Some cog or wheel or gear is slipping around the machinery, and I feel broken. I don’t know what’s broken, much less how to fix it.

I’ve learned to live with it. It’s like being in limbo. Many times I feel so shitty that I want to die. In fact, that’s what I feel like right now. I don’t want to continue living. But at the same time I don’t want to die either. I like being alive, most of the time, though it’s just very painful for me, and like most depressed people I think of death as an easy way out.

But suicide is cheating. I’ve always felt that, even when I’ve come close to ending my life. Those times were times of extreme desperation. I didn’t like the options, but the thought of eternal silence and a permanent end to the pain inside me was so tempting that I at least tried it. It were of course cries for help, just like this posting is a kind of cry for help.

Depression is walking hell. It’s a life of being so broken that you can’t explain the pain to anyone, not even you yourself can see how it works or even why you suffer from it. There’s a line in some song I heard once that goes something to the effect of “when I die I’ll know I’ll go to heaven, because my life is hell”. That’s a very accurate description of how I feel most of the time.

I think that the worst part of depression isn’t the immense pain I feel inside my soul. No, the worst part I think is that it’s impossible to describe. No matter how hard I try it’s impossible for words to even come close to describing the confusion, the frustration, the pain and sorrow that burrows inside me. No matter how I try the words will never make justice to this hell. I’m not good at talking about it either, and that’s why I choose to do it like this - words on a website for both friends, relatives and complete strangers to read. Some part of me has hope that maybe this will help someone else who also feels as broken and dysfunctional as I do.

Seven years since I first discovered that I was flawed. Seven years filled with various degrees of medication, therapy and a struggle to maintain some hope for the future. Seven years of wandering the wastelands of my soul while at the same time trying to maintain something resembling a life. Trying to pull my part of society, trying to feel anything except deep hopelessness and futility. Seven years of trying to see the good things in a world that for each day more and more resembles insanity.

Three years ago I found Ann-Sofie. I fell in love with her quickly. At first I didn’t want to fall in love, it opens up vulnerabilities and all the times I fell in love before it inevitably lead to enormous amounts of pain and confusion. But I couldn’t control my emotions, I felt as if she was my soulmate. And in some ways I think she is. Just like me she’s broken, and we were both alone in a world. We both had big hearts and we just wanted to find someone to give it to.

I will always love her, even though it’s now come to the grim conclusion that I’ve feared from the start.

And now I need to move on with my life. This is proving very difficult now, because more than ever I don’t want to move on. Once again my head fills with thoughts of the great sleep. The never-ending sleep. The dirt-nap. But I don’t want to do it. I want to live, even though it’s a crippled life which brings me a lot of pain most of the time. Because that’s another of the really painful bits of suffering from this depression. No matter how much you try, it’s difficult to not hurt. Just by existing you hurt yourself, and others around you. This echoes back on you, and you feel even more pain because you know that other people hurt around you, and even though you only try to live your life you hurt others, and this hurts you back. It hurts me because I don’t want to hurt people, but somehow people do get hurt by me.

I’m at the crossroads. Once again I’m standing at the crossroads, and once again I don’t want to move on. It hurts so much. If there was a devil to sell my soul to I would do that instantly. I would ask him to take away this pain inside of me, and let me do the opposite to that line of whatever song it was. I would live my life in heaven and then spend eternity in hell.

But there is no devil. There is no afterlife. There is only this life, and I’m trying to make something decent and worthwhile of it. I know I have every possibility, but I lack the courage, the confidence and the energy to do just that. I know I have talents, but I have no confidence in who I am. That’s one of the many ways in which I’m broken.

I just don’t want to be me.

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This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.